Unreal Developement Kit

[Petar Tasev]

I saw this posted at another forum and I thought you guys may be interested:

Epic have realeased there unreal developer kit for Unreal3 for FREE (no joke)

view example here of what i mean.

http://www.moddb.com/engines/unreal-engine...-free-to-indies

http://www.udk.com/

Licenses:

Free game = no cost

Indie game = 99$ for publication, then every 15k$ the developers earn, 2500$ need to be payed to Epic. Example if you earn 45k$ you have to pay Epic 7500$.

so in a nutshell it means you all could make a game with this sell it,and make some serious $$$$$

providing you pay the 99$ for publication (beleave me thats cheap)

the indie licence is the exact same as neoaxis (another game engine i just got).

i would love to see this small community start up as a developer's team,i would even lend a hand if needed

[feneur]

It look interesting and I hope that it will be the base for many good new games in the years to come.

[Sophokles]

Imagine what gaming would be like if they did the same thing with the Sims or Total War engine.

[KingRemus]

I've just downloaded it, lets see if I can create a 3D Rome Total War type game?

[buggy123]

Er, Unreal is used for small rooms with few characters(5-15) with extremely high details and complicated logic/AI. Good for FPS

The engine is definitely not used for RTT type games with massive scale battles

Edited November 21, 2009 by buggy123

[Zervox]

Woaah mate, unreal is used for small rooms?

Gears of War,

Mass Effect,

BioShock,

Unreal Tournament,

Deus Ex,

GRAW,

Borderlands,

Brothers in Arms,

Homefront,

Mirror's Edge,

Singularity,

Rainbow Six: Vegas

The Last Remnant

Lets not forget

3 MMO's

Vanguard - Saga of heroes

Mortal Online

Spellborn MMO

These are the ones that comes to my head

Edited November 28, 2009 by Zervox

[buggy123]

hm yeh, but I'm pretty sure most of them only showed detailed graphics and ran game logic in the players area. However, a total war style game often requires game logic/rendering across the whole map.

Anyways by small rooms I obvious didn't literally mean it. It was metaphorical lol.

Lastly see how most of the game on the list are FPS...proves my point.

[Zervox]

It really doesn't mate, why they are mostly FPS's is because thats what most of the developers have wanted to use it for. It's also the game that most of the game market plays besides MMO's but they take a long time to develop, much longer than RTS, FPS. FPS being most often the shortest one.

Even though metaphorical that was basicly what you meant.

I can tell you this, Unreal Engine is more than enough capable to create a total war style game.

Unreal Engine is geared towards FPS for the most part because thats what they primarily develop.

Same as 0AD's engine is geared towards RTS

Unity -> Casual

Torque -> Casual

But in the end, its all up to the programmers.

about game logic..AI example - Any engine with basic script allowance can have an AI up and running.

MMOs NPC's, Mob's etc are all run on the server itself, much of MMO server side is actually not so different from RTS games, but at the same time also very different way of handling them.

About rendering - Rendering is not done across the whole map all the time, its turned off when your not looking at it, with the logic and location updates still running, basicly keeping the collision running, turning the renderer off when not on screen objects or using heavy LOD when not on screen, if any rts's had been rendering every units real time constantly it would craw to a crash slope because of all the draw calls it would need even Supreme Commander and Sins of Solar Empire handle it this way. There as called rendering optimalization

Edited November 30, 2009 by Zervox

[buggy123]

ok, here the source I got my opinion from:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/to...topic_id=553902

"As for Unreal, it's certainly capable: Bioshock, Dead Space, Medal of Honor, Mirror's Edge all used unreal. Just remember to stick with what Unreal is good at: relatively small indoor environments with low numbers of characters. The engine starts to complain (performance-wise) with either large spaces or more than about 10-15 characters. [i worked as an engineer on a AAA Unreal engine games for the past 3 years]"

there we go. according to this, Unreal is not ideal for a task like RTT. It might be doable, but there are probably better ways.

Edited December 1, 2009 by buggy123

[Ykkrosh]

It'd be technically possible to implement any game with the Unreal Engine, by first deleting all its code and then writing your own - the question is how much its existing features help you. If you're making something like Rome Total War then I guess you'd need a whole new AI system, a new rendering LOD system, maybe a new networking system, probably new map editing tools, etc, so you wouldn't benefit so much from the engine and it may not be worth the complexity and cost (the previous generation engine is $350K plus 3% of revenue).

(The free/cheap UDK doesn't give you the engine source code (only the editing tools and UnrealScript), which seems likely to limit its flexibility for these different kinds of games.)

[Zervox]

Yeah, even though this is thread is about UDK, he said unreal engine, so thats where I picked up.

So I am sorry buggy123, if you were talking about UDK version

The AI is still capable of RTS, its the parameters that its set up for which is not ideal.

Edited December 1, 2009 by Zervox

[buggy123]

it's ok, we're just all contributing what we know